I was reach out to by an EM. We scheduled an informal pre-screening chat that went fine. A few days went by and I scheduled a screening with a recruiter and a different EM. With the recruiter, you literally tell them your life story. This portion is called “Life Story”. I’m a pretty open person, but the recruiter may interrupt you to ask irrelevant questions to fiend interest which throws off the flow. I think they want this to feel like an informal chat, but it’s an extremely invasive way to get to know candidates. It can form into trauma dumping if you’re not careful. This goes on for an hour. The remaining 30 minutes is a code challenge. I was give an object whose keys are city names. The value for each key is an object representing the inventory count for a given item in the city. The other input for the function is an object that’s keys are strings and values are numbers. This object is like an order request. You have to return each city that fully fulfills the order. I’m not a fan of code challenges, white boarding problems, or riddles and in spite of my preparation I didn’t make it past this part of the interviews. No feedback was given outside of the generic “we went with other candidates” response.

I was initially contacted by their Hiring Manager for a quick 10-15 min phone call. That resulted in me getting a 45-60 min phone call, again with the same Hiring Manager. I was then contacted again, and was told that they wouldn't be moving forward with my interview. The questions at this stage are very behavioural, and not techincal.